Fortes soli, fortiores una (Strong Alone, Stronger Together)
by ScourgeOfTheWastes
Summary: The lone wanderer has left a crimson trail of vengeance long into the past, piled high with the bodies of fiends, fools and raiders alike. In her vicious pursuit of Legion, she encounters constant carnage & the typical wasteland hilarity which inevitably ensues. Joining her cause are an eagle-eyed sniper with a deathwish and a chirping, flying eyebot who sings of lasers and murder.
1. Chapter 1

**Title**: **Fortes soli, fortiores una **_(Strong Alone, Stronger Together)_

**Author**: ScourgeOfTheWastes

His bottle of beer was piss warm by now. The Legion Explorer grunted, swathing the back of his hand gruffly against his mouth to mop up the residual suds; his lips were bone-dry and protested against the friction of his hairy, leathery knuckles. Languid hours in the bleary half-awake of midnight weighed heavily on his eyelids. He shook his head and peered across the black vastness of highway 95. Three blistered fingers rapped against the wood paneling of the lonely stakeout watchpost in vexed boredom; night watch had to be the dullest shift of all, despite the glory of the sun rising in the pregnant sky each morn.

Titus took another swig. "**_FUCK!_**" he sputtered, spilling beer along his chin and armored chestplate. He forced it down as if it were full of rocks (and it was, sort of - the swirling winds of the hot Mojave had deposited a fist full of sand in his lager). Thoughts came to mind of the new recruit who had unsuccessfully smuggled a six-pack into camp a few weeks ago; he was whipped for two days straight as punishment.

_What a waste._

Angrily, he knocked the bottle off its ledge and bitterly rejoiced in listening to the brown glass shatter along the jagged boulders below.

One wandering finger found its way to his nose and picked vigorously; truly a class act was he. Coming up empty-handed, he wiped his hand on his pants leg and refocused his attention to the desolate band of busted asphalt winding wildly into the starry horizon.

Out of nowhere, the band of his binoculars went taut, lynching his throat to a choking close. His neutral expression became one scrunched in surprised agony, eyeballs bulging from sunken, tired sockets. His hands flew to his neck but the noose only tightened; the flesh of his face darkened to the same maroon of his bastard flag.

_"See you in hell," _whispered a voice from behind.

He tried to gurgle a rebuttal but it came out as a pathetic, dying wheeze. The end was cold, just as Titus had always wondered.

* * *

In the wasteland, the prospect of companionship might seem appealing (and logically so), but was more often a death warrant than a method of self-preservation. 'Civilization' was a debatable ideology, as humankind was often neither kind nor human. Those who could writhe out of the irradiated ground from the labyrinthine Vaults found not order on the surface, but total chaos - not resilient life, but ubiquitous murder. It was no secret that every tumbled-brick and tin-shanty town had its fair share of criminals, psychos and senseless warfare; humans still dug up old reasons to hate - invented new ones to destroy one another now as they had for millennia, bombs or no bombs.

Stability was both fleeting and futile as the New California Republic had come to realize while burying countless fallen soldiers in barren corners of the wastes. Rival tribes unloaded clips and spilled shells from New Vegas to New Caanan with little bias; live gunfire was the melody of the Mojave, frequent explosions its percussion. The pre-war world had almost become a tall-tale passed down through the centuries from jaded elder to curious vault dweller. In the passing of years and spilling of so much blood, it had become difficult to imagine what the wild west had been like well before the NCR stood on its grizzly haunches and reached for the muscular, veiny throat of Caesar's Legion.

Great Khans to the southwest of Vegas doped up on whatever they could scavenge and beat one another into gruesome, blood-thirsty warriors; any of their ranks would kill you if it meant cooking dinner in a spoon tonight. Though most wastelanders referred to their clan as 'brutal savages', every condescending desert dweller had generally forgotten one humbling common denominator – in the end, they were all just wandering meat-bags trying to survive in a violent, unforgiving land ultimately devoid of morality.

Countless notches etched crudely into the steel pillars of the fence perimeter at Nellis Air Base boasted of a near-flawless kill streak, the marks themselves looking like angry missiles. Any naïve explorer caught treading too close to the Boomer's unholy gates leaves this world naught more than a smoldering splatter-mark in the scorching sand. Their well-stocked sanctuary had never been breached and thus, very little was known of their ethos otherwise.

The Kings of Freeside preferred hair grease to handguns, and though they had moves like Elvis, they had patience like lit dynamite – especially where the NCR was involved. The Great Bear skulked about the city's borders biding its time with hookers and blackjack; soldiers danced drunkenly down the brightly-lit drag of the Strip from sun-up to moon-down, and Not-At-Home watched it all unfold from the towering spire of the Lucky 38 with contemptuous interest. He may have been the only one who saw deep into the ugly truth, who had the courage to look that truth in its grotesque face: the region would never be stable because the slate was never really wiped clean – it was just stained with a new generation of blood.

_War never changes._

While warring factions gored, flogged, shot, incinerated, imprisoned and impaled one another, the Followers of the Apocalypse had settled quietly amongst the filthy slums of Freeside with lab coats, books from the old world and a far more gentle purpose. They may have been the only beacon of hope in a fifty-mile radius that wasn't the blinking bulb of a half burnt-out casino marquee. Despite whatever circumstances had led them to the yellow brick and mortar bastion, every marauder, fiend and fool was patched up and rehabilitated within its bullet-riddled walls.

So onward struggled man, the good somehow barely outpacing the bad; _but the bad grew far, far worse, and the good shrunk backward in its imposing shadow._


	2. Chapter 2

Caesar sat atop a throne of gold and red velvet; thirty-seven severed heads sat atop the pointed ends of wooden stakes lining the path to his tent. His eyes were narrowed, concentrated. To his guards, his gaze seemed to burn a hole through fire itself. They said nothing but waited tensely; none of them would ever admit how much fear his presence instilled in them – how his authority petrified them, made their testes quiver in their ballsacks.

This fear, in turn, made them angry – made them far more eager to smell blood, to conquer and eviscerate. Caesar was no fool; his war prowess was acutely matched by his insight into the human condition. He worked this omnipresent fear to his advantage the way an artist would work soft, wet clay with his bare hands. Legion warriors were men of strength, _not_ intelligence – so it took little coercion to earn their trust and unyielding loyalty… to send them to their glorious demise chanting and marching as if victory was entirely certain.

Unfortunately for the NCR, it sometimes was.

"_Ave Caesar_!" a Prime Legionary shouted, entering the tent. The guards standing erect along the hallway to the throne returned the greeting in a guttural echo, and Caesar withdrew his attention from the pit fire.

"What brings you here, Brutus?" Caesar asked, his voice taking on the usual flat, grave tonality.

"_This_," Brutus scowled, his right hand wrapped around the slender, filthy arm of a female prisoner of war. He dragged her into view and roughly tossed her to the dirt at Caesar's feet. She hung her head low, face covered by flowing, sand-encrusted hair. She was a stunning feral creature, not yet broken by the almighty boot of Caesar.

"She was found trying to free herself and several other slaves by boring a hole through the inner perimeter," he proudly announced. Caesar's expression remained neutral, and this disappointed Brutus. He had been hoping for some form of recognition, no matter how meager.

"Leave her," Caesar said forebodingly. "I'll address this myself."

Brutus bowed out and exited as swiftly as he had arrived. Bright beams of desert sunlight filtered in briefly as the tent flaps fluttered closed.

Caesar rose and stood before the capture, observing the slave collar about her neck. She refused to look at him - not out of respect or even fear, but of an all-encompassing hatred. He bent down and grasped her delicate face in his calloused hand, squeezing firmly.

"_You know escape is suicide, yes_?" He whispered condescendingly. She still refused to look him in the eye; disgust bubbled over inside her like a pot of water boiling out of control.

"Do you not like your new home? We feed you, clothe you, give you a purpose here. All your life, your existence lay at the very bottom of the evolutionary ladder; yet you dare to climb upwards and betray us?"

Terse silence.

"You have succeeded," he paused, _"in betraying only yourself_." He squeezed harder, aggressively, his words coming out like a sinister serpent hiss.

The capture finally shifted her focus from the ground beneath her to his penetrating stare; her whole body shook with untapped rage. She reared back and with all strength remaining slapped him _hard_ across the face. The sound of six machetes suddenly unsheathed from their holsters split the air in lethal unison.

"**_Burn in HELL, devil!_**" she snarled; her top lip curled back above bared teeth, and for a moment she appeared not a woman, but a wolf.

Caesar was rather surprised when the seams adorning the crotch of his regal Roman attire suddenly grew taut; he became stiff with unexpected arousal. Slowly, he withdrew his hand from her and placed it atop the palpitating red welt surfacing on his cheek. A hideous grin slithered across his lips, and his brown eyes twinkled with insidious delight.

"_Such bravado,_" he murmured in mock admiration. The air around them was thick with loaded suspense – Morra knew she would come to learn, whether now or later, the true meaning of suffering.

Without warning, Caesar's fist was a vicious blur as it met her face full-force. She violently crumpled backwards, blood spouting from her broken nose and fractured jaw all along the graceful curvature of her neck. Shards of shattered teeth were carried away in brick-red rivulets down the pale beige smock of her slave garments.

His guards stood ever ready with their swords drawn, though their exalted leader raised a hand in wordless disengagement. They reluctantly re-sheathed their anxious machetes.

"You, _profligate_, are alive only because you were granted clemency," he lectured as she lay motionlessly staring towards the ceiling. Tears freely escaped her eyes in quiet surrender. Caesar paced the length of the tent, circling her like a hunting hawk. "You are alive because we allow you to be. This is an opportunity to serve your people - to make yourself something of fucking use in this new world. You could have the honor of birthing the next great conqueror from that gaping maw between your little legs, you know."

He ceased pacing and hovered over her, his shadow bathing her in ominous darkness. Morra gazed at Caesar one last time and found herself wishing ever more for the end.

"Our leniency was met not with gratitude, or even some semblance of dignity - but with the typical self-righteous insolence expected of you low-life buckets of shit. _Pity_."

He knelt down and clutched her dislocated face again, enjoying the sensation of her hot blood spilling over his fingers. A muffled, defeated groan arose from her heaving chest.

"There is no devil…. _only me."_


	3. Chapter 3

Diffused light from the setting sun stretched across the web of canyons riding the shoulder of highway 95; jagged mesa peaks bleached from centuries of scorching ultraviolet rays bid farewell to its solar glow and lit up like lighthouses for miles around. Amidst the calm of coming twilight, short-lived vortexes of sand and pebbles danced erratically to a beat no one else heard, as if no one was watching. The rope-like grooves left in their wakes gave the impression of the humble desert first learning to draw - and always outside the lines.

Cottonwood Cove had been built up from a modest slave-trafficking port (and the Legion's first established plot on Nevada soil) to a sprawling encampment and bustling hub of highly-conspicuous activity. Its location and swelling size was a rather confident '**_fuck you_**' to the NCR, which had constructed a make-shift lookout perched at the peak of the mountain range which gave way to the wicked heart of Legion territory. Caesar's brood had taken immediate notice of their meek presence - moreso out of amusement than legitimate concern.

A small band of scouts and recruits stood guard at the apex of the slope; twin rows of flickering torches set fire to their silhouettes. Off to the right side of the path were several telephone poles re-purposed as crucifixes. On one hung a skeleton picked clean by birds of prey, on the other a man very close to death; his bones looked as if they would soon break through his horrifically sunburned flesh. This poor soul, a Great Khan drug runner, had lost the energy to moan in agony two days ago. He had tried begging for release at first; then, assisted homicide. His pleas were met with only ridicule and laughter. Now mute with despair, the soldiers often forgot he was there - though the vultures and ravens lingering nearby clearly had not.

A quick and silent death, far more merciful than any the wasteland ever granted, awaited each of the stationed Legionnaires observing their valley with venomous pride. They were eager to anticipate the nervous and calculating Great Bear, but were completely blind to the approaching assassin. This solitary hunter had left a crimson trail of vengeance long into the past, piled mostly with the bodies of raiders, fiends, Vipers and Jackals; Caesar's army was a relatively new and equally curious infatuation. Her drive for retribution was thicker than blood, far more toxic than acid - _this was personal_.

The coming attack itself was one thing; the assailant – _a woman_ – was another. An affront of such audacity would with little doubt cultivate an ultra-violent wave of sloppy, testosterone-fueled retaliation. She was banking on just this sort of reaction; the wise remain calm and cunning, but the foolish grow angry and stupid. Caesar would first offer an exorbitant bounty on her head, then would call for her immediate capture, gang-rape and crucifixion - and this suited her just fine. In some twisted, sadomasochistic way, it would be an honor to earn the loathsome blood-lust of Legion.

Flying solo in the wasteland meant answering to no one, never having to tolerate bullshit or risk life and precious limb to save someone's silly ass from the fool-hardy perdition of wanton confidence. What this wanderer had not expected, though, was to cross paths with an eagle-eyed ally. Red be the day that her life should fall to the hands of a complete stranger perched a half-mile away in some corner of the mountains, his shelter invisible to the naked eye…


	4. Chapter 4

Octavius stood with his brothers under the pale light of the moon, scratching the groin of his armor to little avail. He could not reach the source of his discomfort and shuffled heavily on foot; the sounds of his lorica hamata clanging about floated away into the atmosphere over Cottonwood Cove and were lost in the muffled din of late-night commerce.

"This armor is itching the fuck out of my nuts." He tried scratching again from a different angle with no luck.

"You sure it's not your vagina bothering you again?" Nero quipped.

"_Ascendo tuum, culus,_" Octavius growled through clenched teeth. (Translation: "Up yours, asshole"). Cato had been quietly observing the dock area but was now watching their pissing contest with mild interest.

"_Pudor tu_" ("fuck you") Nero half-heartedly replied, then looked up to the NCR encampment and sighed. "Man, I wish we could fuckin' drink." He yawned loudly and stretched, feeling the onset of exhaustion working its way into his bones. His guard duty double-shift would end around 1am and he was still debating whether he would first have his way with his favorite slave, Iuliana, or just head back to his bunk and collapse into bed. Nero's young libido was busy having an argument with what little reasoning he had in his head, so he didn't catch the verbal smackdown Octavius had laid straightaway.

"Oh, why's that? The beer would drink **_you_**… _pussy._"

Nero came to and wasted no time in tearing the sword from its place of rest on his hip. His reputation preceded him in that he dished it out freely, but was unable to take any sort of reprisal. This was not the temperament which would serve a soldier well in battle, be it verbal or physical. His bretheren regularly pushed his buttons, for it was easy to get a rise out of the fledgling recruit.

"Speak with thy tongue again, _dog_, and I'll carve your mouth from your face!_" _The machete's blade tore the air to ribbons and stopped just short of his comrade's nose. A minute gleam of fear flickered in his eyes, for only a split second; Octavius then smiled as if he were making a deal with Satan himself.

"Your reaction time is pitiful, brother." The machete did not move.

"Ladies, shut the fuck up already and get back to work," Cato barked. His patience with the Nero and Octavius waned by the day. Lately, he had been tossing around the idea of casually dropping their names to the Praetorians the next time they lined the boys up for Decimation.

Nero frowned at his superior and disengaged, making a mental note that Cato was to be drawn and quartered should he ever rise to some level of power.

Unfortunately for him, Nero would never get the chance to rise to power, nor would he ever introduce Cato to the Grim Reaper. His head centered in the crossbeams, one fluid motion requiring little conscious thought or moral scrutiny clutched the trigger and blew apart the poor fucker's skull before he even knew what hit him. His cohorts flinched away in horror as what remained of Nero painted the midnight landscape around them. Angry shouts and calls to action echoed along the canyon walls, only then drowned out by gunfire and a sea of bullets clinking like a concerto across the desert floor.

"If you were a man, I'd fuck the daylights out of you," Mani-Kaga sighed in accomplishment, and gave the barrel of her Anti-Material Rifle a quick kiss. She smirked at the very phallic nature of this gesture before quickly returning her right eye to the scope and picking off Octavius while he thundered up the path, his semiautomatic singing brightly in the dark.

_Head exposed, down you go,_ she thought pleasantly in sing-song fashion, and relished in the joyous triumph of two head shots in rapid succession. Cato crested the hill in a mad dash firing wildly in her general direction, so she briefly abandoned her rifle and reached for the remote control at her side.

Cottonwood Cove was rudely interrupted by an incredible explosion at its center; the sky lit up like daybreak as a massive cloud of fire and smoke materialized around the scrambling bodies of its survivors. Cato whirled around to watch, mouth agape and immobilized. His attention was captured long enough for Seven-Guns to quickly amble over the rockface down to his position.

"…_THE FUCK?!_" he cried, and was for a moment lost between the urge to disembowel his assailant or investigate the attack on his base. Mani-Kaga made the decision for him; his head was hacked clean off in a much more efficient manner than the fate which had befallen poor Nero. His neck became a red fountain as his headless body fell to its knees and slumped over lifelessly. She was morbidly delighted to find that Cato's open-mouthed expression of surprise was frozen onto his disembodied head, and roared with laughter as it rolled down the path.

Dozens of soldiers poured out of their barracks and buildings, flooding the camp with directionless rage and mortal confusion. This was the moment she had been waiting for: with the flip of a switch on her controller, she remote-detonated a second launch – the first had been a High-Explosive projectile, this one a mini-nuke. From somewhere atop an adjacent mountain plateau, a whistling missile hurtled downwards into the chaos and made perfect impact. A miniature mushroom cloud rose into view and incinerated structure and human alike in its ensuing firestorm; nearly half of the valley's inhabitants were wiped out of existence in a mere 16 seconds.

Mani was having trouble believing that her plan actually worked.

"Well,….. _shit_," she said with a goofy grin, to no one in particular.


	5. Chapter 5

She wasn't always known as Mani-Kaga, but what her name had been she could not tell you. She couldn't remember much of that life; trauma had warped her to the point where her original name became lost amidst a myriad of blocked memories and emotional scar tissue.

Mani-Kaga's father left one rainy Thursday evening and never returned; she had been 6 at the time. He may have gone to New Vegas, he may have gone to hell – either way, his absence left a gaping void in her childhood. Her mother Anna did the best she could to raise her only child, but ultimately fell into a deep depression which persisted like a little black cloud over the rest of her life.

Despite a decent upbringing, the years were not kind to either of them, and Anna passed away at the age of 39 from stomach cancer. Neighbors took the quiet, shy little girl and tried to open her wings; the more they coaxed, the further she withdrew. Mani grew to care for them in some small manner, even if she refused to ever show it.

A band of raiders passing through Goodsprings one scorching August midnight took notice of the faded yellow home on the outskirts of town. After putting a few bullets in her foster father's skull, they robbed the place blind and fled, emptying clips into the sky and torching several adjacent houses on their way out. Mani and her foster mother survived only by locking themselves in a moldy maintenance closet; it took every last ounce of her willpower to keep from screaming.

Mani grew up full of hate - she hated her father for leaving, hated her mother for abandoning her (in spite of knowing that Anna's fate was simply the cruelty of post-civilization reality), hated everyone in town for not better defending its finite borders, and hated herself for harboring such impenetrable malice. She had forgotten how to smile, hardly spoke to her neighbors and became a complete recluse whose only spark of joy came from art. Growing older, she found that she was capable of pulling beauty into the world on the ugliest of paper, all of which was wrought yellow with age and stained with decades of decay.

One fine Mojave afternoon, something in her pre-frontal cortex finally snapped. Without saying goodbye to anyone – not Sunny Smiles, not Doc Mitchell or even her foster mother (who was usually swimming at the bottom of a wine bottle by early evening) – Mani-Kaga packed up what little she could carry and walked off into the sunset, leaving Goodsprings a shrinking speck in the hazy background. She had no friends nearby, no living souls left to call family; life was hard, dying was the easy part.

The child she had been was hastily forsaken that day, buried in a shallow mental grave. Mani never even bothered to put flowers aside that little girl's tombstone - far better to leave her a ghost. She knew she would have to grow calloused and violent in order to survive this aimless endeavor of setting out on her own, but she had nothing left to really lose. It was pain that shaped her, loss that broke her, and the persistent absence of justice which eventually resurrected her.

With no recollection of the name her birth mother had bestowed upon her, she trudged through the desert for days a nameless bastard. The relentless heat of the looming sun drove her nearly to madness (if her present mental state could be considered anything of normalcy). When she ran out of food, she set useless traps and watched them sit empty with mounting contempt. Hunger came, starvation went; with little motivation and no real purpose remaining, she was content to spend the last moments of her pointless life in a meditative state, situated on a burnt-sienna precipice overlooking the Mesquite Mountains Crater. Day dissolved into dusk, countless stars huddled together in the night sky only to yield to the coming dawn once again.

Mani-Kaga had all but given up when a series of vivid hallucinations began to unravel reality; she had unintentionally set upon a vision quest, something only the natives of the Americas could understand or appreciate. The pre-dawn landscape around her shifted and breathed as if it had a living pulse. Before her disbelieving eyes, a magnificent glowing bird of molten lava split away from the rising sun and lit the sky on fire - it burned that morning the way the earth had burned long ago in 2077. She felt as if her eyelids had been seared clean off, for she could not close them or look away.

That omnipotent raptor surrounded her in brilliant pillars of orange and red - spoke to her in some ancient, all-knowing tongue. She tried to speak (and could feel her vocal cords vibrating in response) but nothing came out - perhaps she was unworthy to speak to this god-like figure.

_Was this the great Phoenix? The fabled Bird of All Nations?_ Before she could propose the question in her reeling psyche (let alone answer it) the bird vanished, leaving behind a sea of iridescent flames - the only hint of its ephemeral existence.

Parting the curtain of fire was a chartreuse serpent the size of the horizon, whose voice penetrated her skull and seemed to speak within her mind.

"**_Akicita_**," ("_Warrior_") the otherworldly voice shook the heavens, "**_na GXee oh ya key tay_**"("y_ou are looking for your spirit_").

One word arose from her sub-conscious, like a great beast finally returning to the surface -

**_micaje_** ("_my name is_")

…but nothing followed. Her name was shrouded in anger; her old life, shrouded in self-pity.

She knew the language was Lakota, somehow, despite having never heard it spoken in person and knowing nothing of the people or their culture; but it rang clearly in her mind, unquestionably. The words, though completely alien to her, remained etched into her memories and would be remembered even in her last dying breath.

The serpent hissed and the earth below them rumbled like thunder.

"**_New gxay sh lou sh lou tay_ **("_You don't listen_").**_ Key kta yea!_**" ("_Wake up!_")

Her heart felt as if it would burst in her chest from the weight of such providence. The vision came to an apex and then receded, like a painting melting across a canvas from intense heat - drop by bittersweet drop. When the Mojave once again stood empty and still before her, she sat for untold hours staring out at the serene vastness of the southwest; hunger and thirst took a backseat to humbled reverence. Eventually, the moon rose to greet her.

By then, she had found the courage to move on.

* * *

With no question, she knew she was not yet deserving of the title '_warrior'_. No, **_tonkala _**("_mouse_") was probably a more fitting name, for what had she been thus far but a coward?

Upon her arrival in the nearby settlement of Nipton, she had barely enough energy to stumble to a table in the Nipton Hotel's dimly-lit excuse for a bar. In her pocket was just enough in caps to afford a bottle of water, a medium-rare brahmin steak and a strong whiskey and Nuka-Cola. She didn't have enough remaining to tip either the bartender or her waitress, so she left them each a Stimpak and a packet of Rad-Away. They insisted she not worry about it – "_You look like you've seen the devil today, miss"_, the bartender had remarked – but she had a surplus of supplies and was not about to short-change anyone's hard work, especially if done in servitude.

With her stomach full (and her veins loaded), she visited the town hall and picked through the remains of a once-expansive library. The Mayor had turned an evil eye to her inquiries, but his secretary was far more accommodating and had given Mani free reign of whatever she could find. Most of the books and documents were burnt/stained beyond legibility, but in flipping through a couple of pre-war history books, she located some useful scraps of information on the Lakota people and their language.

One day she would remember the person she was, and might even be able to recall her true name; but until then – until she shed herself of the hatred rooted deeply within her - the world would know her as "_Mani-kaga_", or "demon walking".


End file.
